NES Metallica Mystery ROM
When I moved from Lower Allston to Southie, I inherited an abandoned Dreamcast forgotten by an former tenant. Intrigued by it’s reputation as a hacker’s platform, I ebayed some missing cables and finally got it going last week. The CD drive can read burned CD-r’s and there are free development tools, so if you have an internet connection, pretty much anything goes.
To date, I’ve only been messing with the Nester-DC, an NES emulator. Some games have weird quirks (for example, your character disappears briefly after being shot in Contra) but on the whole, I’ve found that it works flawlessly.
At the start, I was googling “NES ROM” and cherry picking games from here and there. The whole world went wacky, though, when I found a torrent with 3600 NES games, organized by country of origin! I’m still going through the pile but there is one in particular that I feel compelled to share.
“Fade to Black” by Frederik Schultz and Morgan Johansson starts up with a grayscale bitmap of a Metallica promo shot. Soon, the familiar 4-voice NES synth starts playing “Fade to Black.” It continues in this way for several minutes before looping. Pressing the controller buttons does nothing and the visual never changes. The arrangement is a stunning achievement in working within the limits of early game music systems (remember that the 4th voice can only make “noise.”)
The link above leads to a .NES file, which must either be burned to an EEPROM, stuck in a cart, and played on an NES - or run through one of the many freely-available soft NES emulators. There is one for every imaginable platform. just poke around a bit to find the software to suit you.
Elsewhere, Robosexual has dozens of NES themes in mp3 format and a student in Finland explains How to get that NES sound!
PS: if anyone has DC stuff they want to get rid of or knows anything about this Fade to Black ROM, PLEASE get in touch - driscollkevin AT gmail DOT com!